(tool scratching)
- [Steph] Welcome to Mother Daughter Projects. I'm Steph.
A year ago in February, on my birthday,
we bought the Ryobi battery-powered leaf vac and multcher.
I've been using it for all that time
and thought it was time to share with you what it does
and what I've learned about it during this year.
First off, I have a small yard, but a giant leaf problem.
You can see I have some great tree coverage in the back yard
but that means a lot of leaves fall.
I've tried just blowing them away or bagging them,
but it was finally time for a new solution,
and that's why I bought the Ryobi leaf vac.
This is part of Ryobi's 40-volt line of outdoor products,
which also work on my Ryobi expanded tools
and my lawn mower.
By the way, we bought the lawn mower
at the same time that we got the leaf vac,
which was actually last year, pre-pandemic,
and it really just seems like a lifetime ago.
Here it is in action.
It comes with a removable fabric bag that leaves fill
and the manual says it shreds
up to 16 bags of leaves down to one.
I have no way of testing this,
but it does hold a lot of leaves.
You want to try to remove sticks from your leaf pile
as much as possible, but in my situation,
it's a little bit of a challenge.
As you can see, I'm actually bouncing the tool a little bit
and that's to try to get just leaves
and to knock the sticks out of the way.
Right now, it is pollen season in Tallahassee, Florida.
So that stuff you see in the air is pollen.
I'm wearing a mask and eye protection
'cause this kicks up a lot of pollen.
My back yard has no grass, just pea gravel.
And this does sometimes get mixed in with the leaves.
But over this year, I haven't seen any issues with that.
Although over time, this might actually
weaken the blades in the tool,
but we'll see as time goes on.
Now, it's really been impossible
to try to get every stick out of the way
when I'm vacuuming up the leaves.
So sometimes they do get stuck.
So here you can see, this is how I can easily remove that.
I first remove the battery.
Then I take off the vacuum tube
by removing the thumb screw there the top
and the locking screw there at the bottom.
And then the vacuum tube comes off
and we can see the motor right here.
And these are the blades.
And I can just take out that stick
and then we're back in business.
(motor humming)
(plastic rattling)
Once the bag is full,
you can easily take it off of the tool.
And then there is Velcro that you can pull up
and then zip down the bag
and you can empty out the bag really easily.
Now, this works so much faster
than manually bagging all these leaves.
I don't use this tool all the time,
but it is a must for my yard.
And there also is a noise level.
It's not that bad, but I do wear hearing protections.
But this right here, I'm gonna show you,
is the sound that the tool makes.
(tool humming and rattling)
Now, a couple of weird things I wanted to share with you
is it does come with a clip
for clipping the bag to the tool.
And it's really cumbersome to do that.
It's kind of hard to get that in place.
So I don't use that because I fill the bag pretty quickly
'cause I have so many leaves and it makes it a challenge
to try to remove the bag from the tool.
This is a weird-looking tool
and that means it's a little hard to store.
This is where I store it in my garage.
It's not perfect.
It works okay, but it is a little cumbersome for storing.
Now, some of my final thoughts about this tool.
Like I said, this is a must for my yard.
I think it works great.
I've never used any other type of leaf vacuum/mulcher.
So I don't know if there's others on the market
that would work better,
but I have always been really happy
with my Ryobi 40-volt outdoor tools
and that's why I decided to go with this model.
And like I said, I'm really happy with it.
I do wish it was maybe
a little bit more ergonomically designed.
I think if there was a strap,
it would work a little bit better.
Although I've tried a strap and it was just,
it didn't super work great.
So possibly if there some more ergonomic design to this,
that would make it better.
I'd also like to be able to buy
some more of the fabric bags.
It'd be nice to just be able to swap out the bags
without having to empty it and then put it back on
so I could have a couple of bags.
And also, I have dogs,
and I always clean up their messes in the back yard,
but sometimes the bag starts to smell a little too doggy.
I'm not gonna get into detail,
but I'm concerned that this bag might
at some point be just really gross and I need a new one.
So I don't know that they sell new bags.
I've been looking and couldn't find that,
but that would be something that'd be nice
to be able to get a few more extras to have.
Thanks for watching.
If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below
and for more projects from us, be sure to visit us
at motherdaughterprojects.com
and subscribe right here on YouTube
and click that bell to be notified when we post a new video.
(birds chirping)